“Are you goin into town? Can you give me a ride into town?” James Carpenter looked around the lot of the Brush Creek Truck Stop and there stood Maggie Boylan, skinny, death-head-looking, Oxy-addled, thieving Maggie Boylan. He thought, This could be a big mistake in the making.

“If you’re headin into town,” she said, “I could sure use a ride.” Maggie was bundled into an over-sized denim coat that must have belonged to her husband. It was a bright, late-winter day with a big wind and she staggered a moment as the wind gusted down off the hills.

James Carpenter was, in fact, headed into town. There was no way to disguise it. He had just hung the gas pump back in its cradle and he had one foot in the door of his truck. He had no handy lie that could get him out of this. So he told her, “I got to drop off some papers at the courthouse.”

“And I got to pick up some medicine for my mother.”

Later, a friend would remind him: Maggie’s mother died a month ago. Later, he would see how Maggie had fooled him all along. But for now, he could not see how he could turn her away.

“I got to go right now,” he said. He was on a deadline and he hoped that Maggie would have to go back to the house to get something together. Maybe she had to get her purse or maybe some papers of her own and maybe he could dodge her that way. But then, what did Maggie Boylan have left to get together?

“I’m ready,” she said. “Let’s roll” She pulled open the passenger side door and launched herself into the seat even before he could get his key into the ignition. She already had her purse. It was one of these backpack purses, so he hadn’t noticed. She pulled it off her shoulders and began to rummage inside. “Shit,” she said, then put her hand to her mouth. “Sorry, I didn’t mean to cuss. You wouldn’t have a cigarette, would you?”

He did not.

“I should of remembered you don’t smoke. Wait just a minute while I bum me a cigarette.” She planted her purse on the seat and jumped back out. “Don’t worry. I won’t be but half a minute.”

There was a little of everything at this crossroads station. Off to one side, on the other side of the grocery section and the Post Office window, beyond the tools and the laundry detergent and the quarts of oil and transmission fluid, four old men sat at their coffee as they did every morning at the same restaurant booth by the front window and they watched everyone who came in for a stick of beef jerky or a bag of chips or a sandwich from the deli. They were good old men, with no harm in them, retired farmers and loggers and one old part-time farmer who had been his fourth-grade teacher.

But they talked; they watched everything that came past and they gossiped without shame. And now the story would get around that he was seen with Maggie Boylan and that story would complicate his life even more than it was already. But done is done. Maggie had him pinned there with her backpack purse on his seat, so she was on for the ride to town.

The old men did not seem to turn —it would not be right to stare— but their eyes turned to watch Maggie leave the truck and enter the store and they watched her stalk down the grocery aisle and right up to their little table where they shrugged all four of them around. Each one kept a pouch of Red Man Chew in the pocket of his coat but not a one of them smoked. Maggie had better luck with a trucker at the counter. He gave her a cigarette and a light and she came out to the truck inhaling desperately.

“You don’t mind if I smoke in here, do you? I’ll hold it out the window.” She cranked the window down and exhaled into the open air.

“I’m so glad you could give me this ride,” she said. “My mother’s got the high blood pressure and you don’t play with that and she can’t get out on her own and she needs that medicine bad. If you hadn’t come around I don’t know what I would of done cause these folks around here is all too uppity to be seen with me, like they aint got their own shit to deal with, pardon my French, so I really do appreciate you doin this and I don’t know how I can thank you.”

All this, as he cranked the ignition which, for some reason, at this moment and under the eight eyes of the old men, would not spark. The dashboard lights were dark, as if the battery had gone dead, so he guessed the problem. He got out, lifted the hood, and saw right away that a white crust of corrosion covered the positive post of the battery and it had chosen this under-the-eight-eyes moment, when he was already strapped for time and Maggie was perched in his cab in front of God and everybody, to break the connection. He knew the quick fix, though. He pulled a hammer from behind the seat, came back around to the battery, and gave it a tap.

Just a little tap, no sense in breaking the post, but a little tap was enough to do the job, so in a moment, the truck started and they pulled out onto Route 125.

Maggie picked up the hammer and admired it. “That’s an old one,” she said.

“It’s an old railroad hammer. Got it at a flea market.”

“You fixed that battery pretty slick,” Maggie said. She set the hammer down between them on the seat. “I was afraid we’d be settin there til tomorrow evening.”

“It aint everything in life is that easy to fix.”

“Don’t I know it? But I always did think you was a smart one. Even when you was still a cop and you was haulin my drunk ass to jail and my kids’d be sayin you was mean and all, I’d tell em, he’s just doin his job, honey, and he aint all hateful like them others.”

James Carpenter remembered something entirely different. Maggie Boylan had cursed him with names he had never been cursed before or since, names almost Biblical in their damning power, names that seemed to have been pulled full-formed from the earth, like stones or the roots of strange weeds. She had her full weight and strength back then and fought like a wet cat right out in front of those children with their eyes dark and wide.

But that was years ago and those children were gone to foster care and maybe grown and had children of their own by now.

“I always said it was wrong the way they done you. You was the best cop this county ever had. And I’ve knowed em all.”

“We’ll have to see how it plays out.”

“Plays out, hell. Everbody knows they done you wrong up there. And the ones that’s left is a bunch of suck-ass perverts, God damn them all to hell.” She did not apologize for cursing this time. “And after you just lost your wife from cancer, double-damn them, that was low.”

James Carpenter looked out at the fields running by, stripped black by the plow and ready for planting, and he did not hear what Maggie said next.

*

His wife was sick for nearly a year and, for nearly a year, James Carpenter slept barely three hours a night. He went about the business of arresting drunk drivers and investigating stolen calves; he endured conferences with doctors, visits from nurses, and the indignities of home health care, all in a half-wakened, half-somnolent state, so that once the funeral was over and his daughter flew back to California, he slept for three days straight.

That made for trouble with the sheriff, but it was nothing like the trouble to come, for when he woke, he found he had developed a habit of restlessness. He found himself still sleepless, alert in every cell.

At three in the insomniac morning, he walked through the rooms of his house, listening to the owls and the coyotes and thinking hard.

For the world had shifted under his feet and he was aware now of a new sense of who was wrong and who was being wronged, who was stealing and what was being stolen.

*

“They got your old man in jail right now, don’t they?”

She looked at the end of her cigarette, decided there was one more draw in it, took that, and threw it out the window. “Yeah,” she said. “That’s another raw deal. Expired tags. That’s all they got on him, expired tags. They’ve had him for two whole months in that little shithouse of a jail. They tried to get him for runnin dope and they tore his car to pieces lookin and couldn’t find nothing but them expired tags he was runnin on til his check would come in. So they took that poor man in and I don’t know how I’m gonna ever make his bail and he aint never smoked more’n a joint or two in his whole life, but they think just cause I sold some drugs ten years ago, which he was never involved in, they think they can find something on us still, and the poor man aint done nothing wrong his whole life except put with me and raise them kids when I was in the joint.”

James Carpenter had his doubts about the story. In twenty years on the force, he hand never known anyone to be held any time at all for expired tags. Rumor had it that the old man took the fall for Maggie to keep her from being sent up again.

“They think cause he’s married to me, they can find something on him. But what they don’t know is, I’m clean. Can you tell? Can you tell I’m pickin up weight? Seven pounds in a month. I’m off the drugs, been off for two months, and I’m eatin right and treatin myself better. Look at my eyes. See? They’re clear now. They aint got that cloud over em. Things aint never gonna be like they was.”

James Carpenter looked out his window at the black fields and the yellow fields and the gray hills beyond and wondered. What have I got myself into now?

*

Maggie Boylan was a pretty girl back when they were both in school. But wild. Wild enough that, at fourteen, she ran away to Nevada, at fifteen, someone had to pluck her off a railroad bridge before she jumped, at sixteen she had her first conviction and her first child, and at seventeen, eighteen, nineteen, and twenty, she had more wild times with even wilder men, a couple more children, and a rap sheet of drunk and disorderlies. There should have been a string of thefts as well, but the only thing Maggie seemed to do well was steal, for things disappeared when she was around, things small as cigarettes and wedding rings and large as bales of hay and two-ton trucks, and she was always suspected, but never charged.

By the time James Carpenter came out of the Army and joined the county sheriff’s patrol, the pretty young girl was just a memory, but the wild woman was in full force, for Maggie had the weight and muscle of a farm woman and she had the grizzle and fight of a cornered animal. Eventually, she dropped the wild men and settled on sixty acres she inherited from her daddy with a man who hoped that love would tame her. But it had not worked.

Each time Carpenter came out to the house on a call, Maggie heaped her curses on him and his partner – he knew better than to go out there alone. She fought, scratched, wrestled, and battered until they could stuff her into the back seat of a patrol car. And then, often as not, she would bang her head against the cage until her forehead bled and they would have to truss her up like an old rug and she would lay up in the cell half the night banging on the bars with a tin cup and shouting out curses that seemed endless in their variety and their bedrock vehemence.

Finally, the judge sent her away for peddling amphetamines at a truck stop in Lynx. She did three years in Marysville, then three months more in a treatment center, and had a tough parole officer who kept her on a short leash for another year after that. She stayed clean, Carpenter supposed, for he never had another call out to the farmhouse near the crossroads until Oxy-Contin blew into the county like a long, ugly storm, followed close behind by crack cocaine. So it started all over again.

*

Oxy-Contin was a terrible thing. It could turn a good man into a thief, a good women into a prostitute. It could make a farm go to seed; a house to go to foreclosure.

Three days after his wife died, he caught a man in his kitchen at three in the morning. You’re too late, he would have told the man if he hadn’t run. Her cousin stole them from her bedside before she was even cold.

*

Maggie Boylan had been a regular part of Carpenter’s work life, but in the months since he lost his job, he had seen nothing of her at all. It was strange, and a little embarrassing, to have her now in the cab of his truck when before, she had always ridden behind him in a patrol car, cuffed to the back seat and cursing.

He glanced over to her ravaged face with the bones all knocking at the doors of her flesh and tried to see in her the pretty, wild girl.

But that girl was gone, as if she had never been, chased away by smoke and needles and a flood of cheap vodka.

*

“I’ll meet you right here,” she told him in front of the drug store. “I’ll just leave this purse right here if you don’t mind.” She pulled out her billfold and stuffed the purse under the seat. “If I aint on the street, I’ll be in here fetchin my momma’s prescriptions.”

That was all well and good; he wanted to spend as little time in town as possible. Get in, get your business done, get out. That was how he liked it ever since the trouble with the job and all the assaults on his reputation. He had to check in with his lawyer and drop off some papers relating to his grievance and appeal. Fifteen minutes max, and he would be ready to head back home.

It took barely ten minutes for James Carpenter to do what he had to do, But twenty minutes later, thirty minutes, forty minutes: Maggie Boylan was nowhere in sight. He checked briefly in the drug store and did not see her there. He could have asked, but that would have meant telling the whole town he had been hanging out with Maggie. So he waited and fretted in the shadow of that damned courthouse.

He could have left her. Any normal person would leave her. But there was that purse under his seat. She had trapped him twice with that purse. The wind shook the courthouse trees and skipped scrap paper across the courthouse lawn. He muttered around the block, talked to a couple of the old men on the benches of the courthouse square, went in for coffee at the 125 Grill, came back around, and saw her leaning against the fender of his truck as if he were the one who was late.

She must have bummed another cigarette; tobacco smoke ran away from her in a gust. He was ready to tell her off for leaving him to wait so long, but she stared at the sidewalk and did not raise her eyes to greet him. Bright tears streaked her guttered cheeks.

So he held his peace. She said nothing as she got in the cab and she said nothing as she pulled herself into her seat. He asked, “Are you all right?”

“I’m all right, it’s them courthouse motherfuckers. They think they rule the fuckin world. Hell, they aint even motherfuckers cause their own whorish mothers wouldn’t have em. They could suck my dick if I had one.”

He turned the ignition and everything was dead again.

“Oh fuck,” she said. “Please get me out of this tight-ass town. I can’t stand these blue-nose motherfuckers with all their little sheephead smiles. Get me out of here before I kill somebody for sure.”

James Carpenter looked behind the seat of the truck, but the hammer was not there. He was sure he put it back in its little nest among the other tools he kept in the truck, but maybe, in his hurry at the crossroads store, he had mislaid it.

“If my old man wasn’t in that jail right now, I’d blow that whole place up. I’d drop that motherfucker right around their ears, every lyin sack of shit walkin those halls, just to see em buried in the rubble.”

She continued to curse as he rummaged through his tools. The hammer was nowhere to be seen, so he pulled out a tire tool, which he thought a little awkward for the job. But it did the job. Just a little tap, and he was able to start her back up.

“Yeah, I’m all right,” she said. “I just want to shoot me a couple deputies.” She had not stopped cursing the whole time he had tinkered with the battery and she showed no signs of stopping now. “I’d like to blow the balls off em all. If they was to have em, which I doubt.”

Carpenter’s own thoughts about the courthouse gang were not so far off from Maggie’s, but he hated to stoke his resentments. “They’re just doin their job, Maggie,” he told her, just to remind himself.

“No they aint. Their job aint to keep me from visitin my own husband. Their job aint to tell me I can’t see him cause I got a felony when they let every skank and crack whore and hustling bitch in the county visit their man, but they won’t let Maggie Boylan see her man who aint done no harm to nobody, just too damn broke to get his tags up to date.”

“Maggie . . . ”

“Which I’m sorry I was late, but they was ready real quick with those pills and I remembered it was visitor’s day and you wasn’t back yet so I thought, hell I won’t be but a minute and it’s right across the street and all. So I’m thinking I’ll just slip over there and I’ll tell him how I been tryin to get the money for his bail and all, but I got his mom to cook for and my mom to get the pills for and I aint had an unemployment check in over a month and I can’t get nobody to explain that to me and that big old lard can that works the front desk says I can’t visit cause I had me that little trip to Marysville.”

“They have their rules.”

“I don’t give a fuck about their rules. They didn’t care about the rules when they searched my old man’s car lookin for dope. They didn’t care about the rules when they come out to the house without a scrap of a warrant lookin to see was we cookin up meth. They didn’t care about the rules when they sent me off to prison with my kids cryin in the gallery. They didn’t care about the rules when they set you up and fired you.”

“Maggie, they suspended me.”

“Well, we know they fired you. Don’t lie.”

“Maggie . . . ”

“Everybody knows they set you up and they fired you. They knew you was on their case about county workers at the golf course and they knew you had their number about old Lard Bucket getting blow jobs from the girls in the jailhouse. And they knew you was on their case about all the little hush-up deals goin on in the county, so they set you up.”

“Maggie . . . ”

“They did. Everybody knows they did.”

“Maggie . . . ”

“Don’t lie. Everybody knows you never give that boy no fifty dollars just so you could ball that little cracked-out bitch of a girlfriend he’s got. He’s just a lyin, snake-eyed, drug-runnin ex-con that’ll say anything to keep from goin back to Chillecothe. He’d lie on his own mother for a nickel rock. It’s true. Don’t lie.”

“I can’t say anything.”

“I know. Cause you got a court case and the lawyer’s done told you don’t talk to nobody about it. But I know. You can’t bullshit a bullshitter.”

“I can’t say anything.”

“You don’t have to. I know exactly what happened. You went down to that trailer to see that little lyin cunt cause you thought she could tell you something about the low-life deals goin down with that courthouse gang and she set you up. Didn’t she?”

“I can’t say.”

“I could understand it if you did want to get a little off her. Old Lard Can gets his right at work. But everybody knows that’s not why you was there.”

“Maggie, I can’t say.”

“You don’t need to say nothing. I know all about it.”

*

Yellow fields, black fields, gray hills in the distance. Maggie talked on. “I know what you’re thinking. How does a crazy bitch like Maggie Boylan know so much about what’s goin on?”

Which was not exactly what he was thinking, but it was close.

“I got my ways. I watch. I listen. I think for myself. I don’t just take what everybody says is true. All them good people all lookin down their noses at you, all they do is think what somebody tells em to think. Aint a one of em thinks for themselves. But anyway . . . ”

The crossroads store was by now a half-mile down Route 125, but the road to Maggie’s sixty acres was just ahead on the left. He turned on the blinkers to make ready.

“No,” she said. “Just take me back to Gleason’s. I got to get me some baloney.”

Back under the eight staring eyes of the four old men.

“Anyway, what I was sayin, don’t ever go around a little lyin whore like that without you got a witness. If you can’t get no one else, I’ll go with you. Cause they’ll fry your ass ever time. You think you know these people, but you don’t know em like I do. They’ll sell you out and leave you hanging for a six pack and a carton of cigarettes.”

He pulled to the edge of the lot. His first thought was to let Maggie off there, on the highway shoulder, on the off chance no one would see her climb out of his truck. But a wave of defiance rose up in him. All his life, those old men had watched him. Let them watch, he thought. They can think whatever they want. He pulled up bold as life by the gas pumps in front of the big restaurant window and the eight watchful eyes of the four old men who did not disguise their staring this time as Maggie stepped bold as life out of the truck.

Maggie stood a moment in the open door with her old man’s coat pulled up around her ears. The wind skipped a plastic bottle across the apron and she shivered the coat higher on her shoulders. “They’ll leave you hangin,” she said. “And won’t a soul stand behind you when they do.”

She reached under the seat for her purse and pulled something else out with it. “Here’s your hammer you was missin.” She smiled, sweet and sly. She laid the prodigal hammer on the seat and started to pull her purse onto her shoulders.

Later, back home, after the wind died down, he would go out to clean up his battery’s corroded posts and to put the hammer back in its place. He would find, on the floor of the passenger side, the empty bag from the pharmacy. Stapled to the bag, he would see the printout that told what had been in the bag. It would be none of his business to look, but he would look anyway and he would see nothing for high blood pressure and he would know then that Maggie Boylan had gotten stoned on her dead mother’s Oxys right there in his truck and he, Maggie’s fool, had not noticed a thing.

But at that moment, as she stood in the open door, with the big wind pulling at the wings of her coat, he felt ready to tell Maggie Boylan he would wait. He was ready to give her a ride up the holler road to her house. He was ready to defy the stares and the talk. He was ready to make the big mistake.

Instead, he told her, “You take care, Maggie.”

“If you ever need me for anything,” she said, “you know where I am.” Then she turned and walked away. The wind gusted down from the hills and across the lot and blew up a great column of dust and paperscrap. Maggie staggered a moment in the wind and turned back to say something more. But the wind tore the words away. She staggered again and maybe it was the wind or maybe it was the Oxys. But for just a moment, with the March wind at the wings of her oversized coat, Maggie Boylan looked slim as a girl.